More personal data lost by the government

Another month and so another scandal of peoples data being lost. This time it was a laptop full of information on 600,000 people who expressed an interest in joining the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Royal Air Force, and hundreds of highly personal state benefit documents had been found scattered near a roundabout in Exeter.

This is not the first time that private records, including bank details have been dumped like this at this location which shows the contempt that these 'public servants' show to the people that pay their wages. Can't be bothered to dispose of the records safely? Just chuck them out of the car window, its only people's bank details. Where any private company guilty of such flagrant disregard of people's data the perpetrators could be facing a jail term, but in the public sector they would just be quietly shuffled to another department or allowed to retire on their hugely generous pension.

As for the laptop I can only hope that it was encrypted. Not that keeping your data private via encryption is an option for the rest of us since labour made it a criminal offense for a private citizen to have encrypted data on their own computers and not be able to produce the keys on demand, even if that data was inaccessible from the file system having been deleted so long as the operating system has not overwritten that particular area of the disk. Perhaps now they are beginning to understand the need for encryption? Maybe now they are beginning to understand that not all data hidden from prying eyes has to be evidence of evil relating to whatever the scare story de jour is? No, probably not. They certainly won't be thinking of making people innocent until proven guilty having managed to get the burden of proof reversed in these cases, that isn't the Labour way.